


Thinking of You

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, F/M, Humanstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 22:26:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the only thing getting The Handmaid through her day is the thought of The Signless</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thinking of You

Most days, you go into work with a sigh, and you look like you might cry as you step into your office. You hate this job and this office and these coworkers and especially your boss. There’s not a lot in the rest of your life that relieves the hate either.

Today is different though. Today you stand a little straighter and hold your head higher. When coworkers call your name in greeting, you manage more than a simple curt nod. You check the time when you sit at your desk and you think ‘twelve more hours’.

The work day crawls just as slowly as ever, but you find yourself able to bear it now. It’s still hard to concentrate on repetitive phone calls and complicated paperwork and long reports. But usually it’s because you’d rather be drinking bleach.

The memory of last night is what’s keeping you going today.

Your boss looks back at you suspiciously when you don’t greet him with your usual glare and sarcastically chipper “Good morning, sir.” The only thing that makes the time go more slowly than doing your work is not doing it, just waiting for five o’clock so you can leave. So you throw yourself into it without your usual sass.

You’re good all morning, until time for your lunch break. Technically you’re supposed to have an hour, but you always end up staying late whenever you take more than twenty minutes. That means you have to bring your lunch and eat in the break room, where there’s usually other coworkers preparing to work through their breaks.

As usual, you take a seat close to the wall and hope everyone will ignore you as thoroughly as you ignore them. Today you have no such luck. A couple of guys who gossip more than anyone else you’ve ever met take seats on either side of you, so that you’d have to squeeze around awkwardly to escape.

You flash them a forced smile, but otherwise you don’t greet them and continue to eat. They ignore your rudeness as per usual, meaning they’re probably about to try to get some information out of you. Neither of them seems to get how little you care about them and their social circles. You brace yourself for questions about things you don’t care about.

“I saw you at Luigi’s last night,” says one as he pulls a sandwich out of a paper bag.

Oh, you should have guessed they wanted to talk about you. “I didn’t see you,” you say coldly. Maybe if you’re rude enough they’ll go away.

You wish you were that lucky. “I wanted to go over and say hello,” he continues. He doesn’t even look at you as he says it, trying to force himself to be casual. “But you looked a little busy.”

“I was.” You didn’t even notice what was going on in the rest of the place. You were so engrossed in conversation – or, well, listening to him. You could tell he loves talking more than anything, not that he wouldn’t let you get a word in if you wanted to.

“I thought I recognized that guy you were with.” Oh, wonderful, he’s throwing caution to the winds. Here it comes. “Isn’t he a politician or something?”

Bullshit. Of course he recognized your date. “Or something.” You take another bite of your TV dinner, in case you need the time to chew and swallow and think of an answer for the next question.

The other one finally pipes up. “You were having dinner with a politician?”

You turn your head to stare at him. You know he just heard you deny that. “He’s not a politician. He’s just a public speaker who touches on politics sometimes.” He told you he may run for office someday, when he’s a little older and more prepared.

“Oh, the one that preaches about pacifism?”

“Yes.” When you were alone with him, he talked about more than just peace and love, happiness and tolerance. He talked about that a lot, but you also had conversations about family and music and work and technology. He talked a lot about himself. That’s fine with you; narcissism just something you both have in common.

The men on either side of you share a look, and you think you know what they’re trying to get at. They must have heard him speak. Nearly every evening, he can be found on a street corner or in a park or near an event with a crowd around him. You met him in the city square, for example. Almost everyone you’ve met has seen him, and the ideals he talks about are in almost direct contrast with your company’s practices. Your boss, the CEO, is a vicious competitor who exploits every loophole and every weakness.

You have a large part in that, to be honest. You do a lot of cheating, forgery, dirty work when he doesn’t have time for it and cleaning up after when he does. Officially you’re his secretary, but those who know what goes on behind the scenes call you his handmaid as a joke. It’s just one more thing that you hate about this job.

So dating a man who deplores such action must seem like fraternizing with the enemy. You don’t care. You only have this job because nobody else is hiring and offering a salary that holds a candle to yours.

You don’t offer anything to the men on either side of you. They can think what they want. You’re not going to lose your job for dating a man your boss wouldn’t like. He knows you hate your job and he still won’t fire you.

You can’t possibly think of him as an enemy anyway, not anymore. He was a perfect (albeit short) gentleman, and he made you laugh like you haven’t in ages, and you can’t wait to see him again.

As you leave the break room to escape any further questioning, your mind wanders to what happened after dinner. You went to a movie – simple, classic, but it didn’t fail you. It was a pretty bad movie, and you mocked it in whispers together. As you go back to work, you keep remembering his impression of the leading man that got you both kicked out of the theater halfway into the movie.

You had decided to walk in the park after that, keeping up your string of bad jokes and worse impressions. You try not to laugh in the middle of important phone calls as you think about the highlights.

When your boss comes in from his own lunch break, you have three and a half hours left of work. To you, that means six and a half hours until you told yourself it would be acceptable to call him again, if he didn’t call before. (He had said something about not how he didn’t like trying to seem aloof, so you think you can abandon the three day rule this time.)

You didn’t think it was possible for time to go more slowly than it has been, but it starts to now. A few times you swear the clock is going backwards. You count to sixty and about five seconds have passed. You compose a long email in just under two minutes. Usually your reports at the end of the day take the better part of an hour, but today it’s only a handful of seconds.

When it’s finally ten minutes to five, you think ‘fuck it’ and head out early. You never leave early, even on Fridays, so just once won’t hurt. You can’t do anything in ten minutes anyway.

As you step out of the building and into the parking lot, you’re especially glad that you left when you did. Your bright blue car is hard to miss, but what’s even more obvious is the neatly dressed man placing a bouquet on the hood.

You’re suddenly very conscious of your dreary work appropriate clothes and the makeup you haven’t touched up since this morning (and didn’t put any effort into anyway), but you still can’t help but smile. He doesn’t seem to notice you at first.

You try to sneak up on him, but your movement isn’t nearly as stealthy as you’d hoped. He turns to see you crouching ridiculously, and you both blush.

You’re still taller than him when you straighten up, even without your heels from last night. His hair is messier, and when he runs his hand through it nervously it gets worse. “I wanted to surprise you,” he says shyly, trying to smile.

You smile back at him. You wish the heat in your cheeks would cool. When it doesn’t, you turn to the flowers on your car and pick them up. “They’re lovely,” you say. You pluck the card out of them and read it. ‘Thank you for last night,’ it says.

He seems unsure of what to do now. You guess he was just going to leave the flowers and dash. To show your own appreciation, you bend down and give him a kiss on the cheek. His face darkens even further. You try not to smirk.

“Since we’re here, how about we have dinner on me this time?” You’re not all that hungry at the moment, but you don’t want him to just go either.

Thankfully, he nods. “That sounds lovely.” Both of you grinning from ear to ear, you hop in your car and leave for your second date in two nights.


End file.
